I am starting to share the opinion in the article. I used to use Claude Code with strong open models, and sometimes pay for Opus.

Now one of my main drivers is out of the box pi’s 4 built in tools, and I add just two extra tools: pi-sandbox and a paid for search service tool. This setup works great with the latest deepseek v4 flash, switching to more powerful open models occasionally.

I wrote my own coding harness in Common Lisp that is almost free or 3rd party libraries and I basically copied pi + the 6 tools I use for pi (except I have two search tools using different vendors in my Common Lisp code).

Everyone (and every company?) should run their own tests and experiments. I find it sad when I talk with people who default to the most complex and the most expensive tools without even trying to evaluate alternatives.